Laravel Forge vs Vapor: What are the differences?

1. Deployment Workflow: Laravel Forge focuses on providing a seamless and user-friendly deployment workflow for Laravel applications. It offers a straightforward interface and allows developers to easily manage and deploy their applications to various servers and cloud providers. On the other hand, Laravel Vapor is specifically designed for deploying Laravel applications on AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. It abstracts away the underlying infrastructure and allows developers to focus solely on their applications, without having to manage the servers or scaling configurations.
2. Server Management: Laravel Forge provides built-in server management features, allowing developers to easily provision, monitor, and scale their servers. It offers a simple user interface for managing servers, SSL certificates, databases, and more. On the other hand, with Laravel Vapor, developers do not have to worry about server management at all, as it fully abstracts away the server infrastructure. AWS takes care of provisioning and managing the serverless environment, making it more convenient and scalable for developers.
3. Pricing Structure: Laravel Forge offers a subscription-based pricing structure, where users pay a fixed monthly fee based on the number of servers they manage. The pricing includes the server management features and support from Laravel. On the other hand, with Laravel Vapor, users pay based on the actual usage of AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate resources. This pay-as-you-go model allows for more cost-effective scaling, as users only pay for what they use.
4. Serverless Architecture: Laravel Forge deploys applications on traditional servers, while Laravel Vapor leverages a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. This means that with Laravel Vapor, the application is automatically scaled and managed by AWS, without the need for developers to manually configure and scale servers. This serverless approach provides more agility and flexibility for handling traffic spikes and minimizing wastage of server resources.
5. Auto Scaling and High Availability: Laravel Forge supports auto scaling to a certain extent, allowing developers to scale their servers vertically by adding more resources. However, it does not provide built-in support for horizontal scaling or high availability. On the other hand, Laravel Vapor takes full advantage of AWS auto scaling and high availability features. It automatically scales up or down based on traffic demands and ensures the application is distributed across multiple availability zones, improving its resilience and fault tolerance.
6. Infrastructure Management: Laravel Forge simplifies infrastructure management by abstracting away the complexities of server provisioning and configuration. It provides an intuitive interface for managing servers, databases, SSL certificates, and other essential components. In contrast, Laravel Vapor takes infrastructure management one step further by abstracting away the entire server infrastructure. It leverages AWS services like AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, allowing developers to focus solely on code and application development without worrying about infrastructure management.

In summary, Laravel Forge focuses on providing a user-friendly deployment workflow with server management features, while Laravel Vapor abstracts away the server infrastructure and provides a serverless architecture on AWS, with auto scaling and high availability capabilities.